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Thursday, February 16, 2012

OT: Could Law School Applicants Hit a 20-Year Low?

by Jeff Sovern

Last month the ABA Journal reported that as of January 13, the total number of applicants at ABA-approved law schools stood at 31,815. . . ." Last year, about 48% of applicants had applied by that date. If that trend holds, the total number of applicants for the year will be about 66,281. Going back to the 1990-91 application cycle, the smallest number of applicants was 71,500, in 1998-99 (the high was 100,600 in 2004-05).

Back in the 1998-99 year, the number of law students who actually enrolled was 42,804. By contrast, in the last five years, the smallest number of law students who enrolled was 48,937.

We may see a late surge in applications. Law school applications tend to rise when unemployment is high, as it obviously continues to be; perhaps some college students will discover they can't find jobs and apply later in the cycle. But if the current trend holds, we may see law schools competing more fiercely than usual to fill their classes. Because there are more law schools than there were back in 1999, with more seats to fill, law schools may admit more applicants with weak credentials. Alternatively, law schools may shrink their classes. Probably we will see both reductions in class sizes and law schools going more deeply into the applicant pool.

Comments

Given the state of job prospects for legal graduates, I think it would be irresponsible for law schools to accept applicants with weak credentials. My thinking is that were law schools to accept those less qualified, then those students would be less likely to do well in law school and consequently, less likely to find a job after law school. Law schools need to begin taking responsibility for the weak legal job market by not overflowing the market with lawyers. I

No, we won't. What few people point out is that the number of applicants didn't surge as highly in the Lesser Depression as it did in the early 2000s recession, which is contrary to what we would expect. For instance, the number of applicants per law school peaked in 2004 at around 550, it dropped to about 420 in 2008, and went back up to only 450 in 2010. Since then, projections show it's gone into a nosedive. It's highly likely the the number of applicants per law school will drop to 350 this year, close to or lower than 1985. The image in my sig illustrates this.

More importantly, the drop won't be distributed evenly among law schools, with many of the less-prestigious ones bearing more of the losses. The real question is whether the standalone law schools hit with applicant shortfalls will also face a run on their bonds and face solvency issues. Recently, Moody's (if I recall) downgraded New York Law School's bond outlook to "negative."

@Andrew: Yes, it would be irresponsible. But law schools have budget structures that make it hard or impossible to drastically cut costs on short notice. Some law schools are seeing application drops of 30%. For the law school to hold the line on credentials and take a *gross revenue* drop of 30% between last year and this, while expenses stay the same, could mean going deeply into the red. My law school is reducing its class size and taking the financial hit, and I think that's the right thing to do. But I don't expect every other law school to do the same.

It's much ado about nothing. The law schools can fill all of the seats and then some simply by continuing to publish fraudulent (or at best misleading) employment statistics and by lowering their admissions standards.

There is an entire class of college students who never dreamed that they could do something as prestigious as attend law school. There are college graduates who have GEDs. There are college graduates who come from poor families where they are the first to ever attend college. There are numerous graduates of for-profit schools. We even have college graduates who have Down Syndrome today. A great many of the people in those categories would be tickled pink at the thought that they could obtain a professional degree, and most still believe that an advanced college degree is a guarantor of vocational and financial success. Our politicians', our intellectuals', and the media's campaign to indoctrinate the public with the notion that college education guarantees vocational success and riches is still going strong.

Thus, a lower class of students will fall for the law schools' slick brochures and enroll. The law schools might have to lower their admissions standards to admitting people who have 2.0 GPAs from for-profit schools and who can only score 135 on the LSAT, but they'll be able to fill their seats so long as an infinite amount of student loan dollars are available from the federal money spigot. They could probably even raise tuition.

In the meantime, the general public will enjoy touchy-feely, warm-and-fuzzy feelings at the thought of so many disadvantaged people being able to go to college and law school. Our politicians, intellectuals, and the media will continue to bombard the sheeple with the message that higher education is the magical solution to our nation's economic and unemployment problems, and the sheeple won't notice that tens of millions of college graduates are unemployed or underemployed-and-involuntarily-out-of-field, overqualified and unemployable for most other jobs, and burdened with student loans that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.

The most beautiful part of the higher education scam is that because we have all been indoctrinated with free market notions of personal responsibility and meritocracy, impoverished college graduates will blame themselves rather than question whether or not our nation is producing far more college graduates than the economy needs. Also, other people, including their parents and relatives, will blame them for their predicament.

May was the network's worst month for total viewers during primetime in over 20 years. CNN drew an average of just 389,000 primetime viewers from April 30 to May 27. In comparison, MSNBC drew an average of 674,000 total viewers, while Fox News boasted an average of 1,692,000 total viewers.